This Workers’ Day, the most meaningful thing any Nigerian employer can do is not write a tribute to their staff. It is to turn the lens inward. To ask, seriously: Are the conditions in which we are asking people to do extraordinary work actually worthy of that ask? If the honest answer is not yes, then the work starts today.
Every year on Workers’ Day, Nigerian employers reach for the same script: the appreciation post, the all-staff email, the quote graphic scheduled for 8 a.m. And then work resumes, unchanged. The problem is not that these gestures are insincere. The problem is that they cost nothing, and they change nothing. They are substitutes for the harder, quieter work of actually building a workplace that works for the people inside it.
That harder work has a name. It is called people strategy. And in Nigeria, it remains one of the most underdeveloped functions in organisational life, not because leaders do not care about their staff, but because they have not yet treated the question with the seriousness it deserves. They staff programmes rigorously, they invest in systems and compliance, and they brief boards on financial risk. But the conditions under which their people do all of that work? Those get a graphic on the first of May.
This piece is about what that gap costs, and what closing it actually looks like.
The Penalties Hidden in Your HR Manual
Most people policies are not designed to harm, but many do, clause by clause, without anyone in the leadership realising. Take one of the most common examples: maternity leave that is “annual leave consuming.” In plain terms, this means a woman who gives birth cannot also take her annual leave that year. The financial logic is legible. The human impact is not.
What that clause communicates, in writing, formally, as institutional policy, is that a woman’s recovery from childbirth is equivalent to an holiday. That maternity leave is rest. That she has already “had her time off.” That is not an oversight. That is a policy position. And if your manual still carries it, it is your organisation’s position.
The same logic applies elsewhere. Bereavement leave that lasts three days and then disappears. Flexible work provisions that technically exist but require six approvals to access. Sick leave policies that quietly penalise chronic illness. These are not isolated clauses, they are a pattern: organisations that were built for maximum output, not for the human beings delivering it.
The cost is not abstract. Talented staff leave, not in a confrontation, but in a quiet decision made during a difficult month, when the organisation failed to show up and they noted it. Research on employee turnover consistently identifies perceived organisational support as one of the strongest predictors of retention. When people feel the institution does not have their back, they find one that does. In Nigeria’s increasingly mobile talent market, that decision is easier to make than it has ever been.
Ask most Nigerian employers whether they care about staff wellbeing and the answer is ‘yes’, immediately and sincerely. Ask whether they have built systems to support it and the conversation becomes more tentative. This is the gap: good intention without institutional architecture.
Removing hidden penalties does not require a large budget. It requires the discipline to read the manual and ask, clause by clause: where are we punishing life events? We recently did exactly this at the Solina Centre for International Development and Research (SCIDaR).
“We removed the annual-leave clause from maternity leave entirely. We extended maternity protections to cover adoption and surrogacy. We introduced provisions for miscarriage recovery. We doubled paternity leave, because parental responsibility is not a woman’s project alone, and organisations that treat it as one pay for it in ways they rarely measure.”
None of those changes were expensive. They were intentional.
“The moments that define an employer’s character are not the good ones. They are the difficult ones. Anyone can be generous in January. The test is how you show up in grief, in crisis, in the middle of someone’s worst week.”
Wellbeing Is Not a Perk. It Is Infrastructure.
Ask most Nigerian employers whether they care about staff wellbeing and the answer is ‘yes’, immediately and sincerely. Ask whether they have built systems to support it and the conversation becomes more tentative. This is the gap: good intention without institutional architecture.
Mental health is the clearest example. Across sectors, health, finance, education, professional services, Nigerian professionals are operating under sustained pressure: economic instability, long commutes, job insecurity, the cultural weight of being a breadwinner in an environment where formal safety nets are thin. Yet, mental health support remains conspicuously absent from most HR frameworks. It is treated as a personal matter, outside the employer’s remit.
That position is increasingly indefensible. Decades of workforce research consistently link employee wellbeing to lower absenteeism, higher productivity, and better outcomes for the people organisations exist to serve. The World Health Organisation estimates that depression and anxiety cost the global economy over $1 trillion annually in lost productivity. An employer that does not invest in mental health is not neutral. They are absorbing a cost they have chosen not to name.
The same is true of bereavement. When a staff member loses a family member, what most Nigerian organisations offer is a few days off and silence. What research on employee grief shows is that how an organisation responds to personal loss is one of the most formative experiences a worker has, for better or worse. A structured, human response – a financial gesture to offset immediate costs, acknowledgement from senior leadership, access to counselling – does not require deep resources. It requires the decision to have a policy in the first place.
An employer who takes care of people in their worst moments is not being soft. They are building the kind of loyalty that no bonus structure can replicate.
The organisations winning the talent competition in Nigeria right now are not always the ones paying the highest salaries. They are the ones that have built clear, consistent, humane systems, and cultures that make people feel part of something worth giving their best to. Where performance expectations are explicit, where leave is not a negotiation, and where a staff member who faces a crisis at home does not also face a bureaucratic obstacle at work.
The leadership priority most boards are missing
One of the most consequential mistakes Nigerian organisations make is treating people management as an administrative function. HR processes paperwork, HR manages compliance, HR shows up when something goes wrong, but strategy happens elsewhere, in the boardroom, in the programme design meeting, in the donor conversation.
This is a structural error. Every strategic outcome your organisation is pursuing – growth, quality, delivery, reputation – is mediated by the people executing it. Their clarity, their motivation, their psychological safety, their sense that the institution sees them as human beings and not headcount – these are not soft variables. They are the operating conditions for everything else. When they are poor, performance suffers, and it suffers in ways that are difficult to trace back to HR, so leadership rarely connects the cause and the effect.
The organisations winning the talent competition in Nigeria right now are not always the ones paying the highest salaries. They are the ones that have built clear, consistent, humane systems, and cultures that make people feel part of something worth giving their best to. Where performance expectations are explicit, where leave is not a negotiation, and where a staff member who faces a crisis at home does not also face a bureaucratic obstacle at work.
But beyond this, they create environments in which people understand the significance of the work they are doing, feel trusted to own it, and are energised by the knowledge that their contribution matters. In those organisations, people are not just employed; they are invested. These are the baseline that talented people increasingly expect, and the difference between a workforce that works for a pay check and one that works with ownership, pride, and sustained energy.
If you lead an organisation and you have not personally read your employee manual recently, that is where to start. Not to audit compliance, but to ask a different question: If I were a member of staff, would I feel protected by this document? Would I feel seen? Or would I feel like a resource to be managed?
“The organisations that will define Nigeria’s development future are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the boldest strategies. They are the ones that invest intentionally in their people, build strong and scalable systems, and create environments where talent can consistently perform, grow, and deliver impact.”
This Workers’ Day, the most meaningful thing any Nigerian employer can do is not write a tribute to their staff. It is to turn the lens inward. To ask, seriously: Are the conditions in which we are asking people to do extraordinary work actually worthy of that ask? If the honest answer is not yes, then the work starts today.
Babafemi Aina is the chief operating officer of the Solina Centre for International Development and Research (SCIDaR), where he oversees SCIDaR’s operational infrastructure, people systems, and institutional excellence.